The Big Bang was simply a drawer
being slowly pulled open.
Space didn’t expand, the rooms got smaller.
Quasars are actually restaurants on fire.
Galaxies, we’ve discovered, are really
bathroom lights left on all night long.
What you think of as vast distances
are an optical illusion, the vacuous void
in fact a church hall for hire.
Those aren’t planets you’re seeing either,
they’re Christmas baubles,
the sun a cigarette end
glowing in an overfilled ashtray.
A friend says the stars are sticks burning,
but I have to disagree:
stars are pimples on the cheeks of God.
As for how the cosmos ends,
think of an adolescent sulk,
an initial enthusiasm petering out
like a fad or ardour.
Astronomically Speaking
Bruce McRae, a Canadian musician, is a multiple Pushcart nominee with poems published in hundreds of magazines such as Poetry, Rattle and the North American Review. His books are ‘The So-Called Sonnets (Silenced Press); ‘An Unbecoming Fit Of Frenzy; (Cawing Crow Press) and ‘Like As If” (Pski’s Porch), Hearsay (The Poet’s Haven).